Farmville for Dummies? Coming soon to a bookstore near you

Kyle Orland coauthored a book about Farmville... and yes, that's somewhat …

There is an upcoming book called Farmville for Dummies. Let's all sit back for a moment and bask in the fact we live in a world where such a work exists.

The book may seem like an easy punchline to a joke no one is telling, but coauthor Kyle Orland has been writing about games for a long time, for publications such as Joystiq, NPR, and now Gamasutra. We asked him to justify the existence of the book and, surprisingly, he has some compelling arguments.

The case for a Farmville text

"Sure, Farmville isn't a particularly difficult game—it practically holds your hand in telling you how to play, and there's a limited amount of strategy to playing," Orland told Ars. But he argues that many people who play the game don't have much experience with video games, and may require some extra help. "Some of the sections of the game—especially the farmer's market and some aspects of animal tending—require multiple, time-lapsed steps to complete successfully, and the game only gives one screen of text-heavy explanation for how to go about them." The book breaks down these tasks, and offers full-color images to help gamers follow the instructions.

Of course, knowing a few tricks is also helpful. "The book also gives a lot of details and reference that might not be apparent to a casual player," he said. "For instance, we outline a few somewhat-seedy methods for leveling up quickly by doing a few repetitive tasks over and over, lay out what items are unlocked at what levels, and suggest the most time- and cost-effective crops for different points in the game." There is also the problem of less-savvy players falling prey to scams, something addressed in the book.

The strength of Farmville for Dummies is that it's a physical object gamers can page through, instead of having to scour the Web for accurate, detailed information about the game. "It's the same reason programming books continue to sell despite the existence of comprehensive syntax references online," Orland explains.

But still, he had to play the damned thing

The first time Orland played Farmville he had to give himself a goal to maintain interest: to recreate the first level of Super Mario Bros. out of haybales. After that, his interest waned and he left the game. Writing the book meant playing extensively for research, and a funny thing happened. "While I was writing the book, I actually came to look forward to the half-hour or so of mindless clicking that was my daily farm maintenance," he said. "It was a nice escape, in the same way watching a Simpsons rerun for the 50th time was." He estimates he put around 50 to 60 hours into the game, all told.

Farmville is also a moving target. "The most surprising thing I found was how often Zynga updates the game. A lot of stuff we wrote about early in the two-month-or-so writing process changed by the end of the process, and we did our best to update the text as necessary, but some of the content was unfortunately out of date by the time the book went to the printers," he said.

Orland's coauthor, Angela Morales, was much more knowledgeable about the game, and his role was often checking facts, taking images, and organizing the data. "I knew the game had evolved a lot since its launch, but I wasn't quite prepared for the speed and frequency of that evolution."

Hearing Orland talk about Farmville from the point of view of a lifetime gamer was fascinating. "The real problem with the game's longevity, for me, is the lack of any real pushback or the possibility of failure," he said. "If you check in every day, it's impossible to stop making forward progress in the game. There's no sense of triumph because there's nothing to triumph against, except the prospect of spending your time some other way."

So the book is done, we're expecting a review copy in the coming days to see just how it came out, and we had to know about Orland's plan for his farm. His answer? After the book was edited, he dropped the game, and told us he has no plans to return.